The Sharpshooter – A Kurosawa Mystery Solved

Check out the latest entry on my blog Cinegems for the solution to a very interesting Kurosawa mystery, from his autobiography. (Note: it has to do with Kurosawa’s entire approach to music scoring, from the late 1940s onward.)

(For those curious about how the Wikipedia Kurosawa page and the attempt to nominate it as a Featured Article went, it’s a very long story, but suffice it to say that the Wiki-fascists intervened and shot it down, despite my best efforts to accommodate the very extensive criticisms and suggestions of the more reasonable of the page’s reviewers. Because of persistent problems over copyrighted images, I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll try to re-nominate it soon. I’m kind of disillusioned about the whole process.)

Great detective work, I had assumed the film AK got that idea from would have been better known. I was thinking that music had been used like that in a few other 1930’s or 40’s films, but when I try to think of a specific example, I can’t.

Sorry too, to hear about the travails on wikipedia. A pity that more of the known AK scholars didn’t weigh in – so many of the facts in that article are well attested, innumerable footnotes shouldn’t be necessary. But nevermind, the article is there and I think it will stand the test of time as an ideal introduction to AK for anyone kicking off their interest in the subject.